This issue: October 15, 2012 (Vol. 18, No. 05)

EDITORIAL

Almost 25 minutes into last Wednesday night’s presidential debate, it was already clear Mitt Romney was doing better than expected, and that Barack Obama was a bit flat. But it wasn’t yet obvious at the end of the debate’s first segment that the debate would produce a decisive winner.

Then moderator Jim Lehrer moved from taxes to a discussion of “what to do about the federal deficit, the federal debt.” Mitt Romney spoke first. His two-minute answer was the inflection point in the debate. After that, he was on a roll—a conservative roll. And President Obama would be reduced to an ineffectual defensive crouch—a liberal crouch.

ARTICLES

The Time cover story last week was headlined “The Mormon Identity.” The cover, featuring Mitt Romney in a stained-glass window, said in smaller type, “What Mitt Romney’s faith tells us about his vision and values.” Newsweek had President Obama on the cover, identifying him as “The Democrats’ Reagan” and heralding the story inside as “What Obama Will Achieve in His Second Term.”

Neither of the stories, to put it mildly, was helpful to Romney’s presidential campaign. The piece in Time was fair, but the timing, long after Mormonism had faded as a factor in the election, was suspect. In Newsweek, Obama was lionized, ...

FEATURES

‘Probably the nation which is most difficult to govern is the Hungarians,” says the man who governs them. It is late on an unseasonably warm Friday in September. Sunlight is slanting through the windows of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s office, which looks onto the Danube from the crimson-domed nineteenth-century parliament building in Budapest. “Ten million freedom fighters,” Orbán says. “That has some advantages, but from the governmental side it’s difficult.”

Orbán, the youngest of Hungary’s Cold War heroes, ought to find it easier to govern ...

Books & Arts

This is perhaps the most lucid, even-handed, and convincing examination to date of the threat that President Obama—and his potential reelection—poses to our republic. No one who reads I Am the Change will come away thinking this election is about the economy. In truth, this election pits America’s founding principles against Obama’s efforts to transform them. Obama noted as much in October 2008, declaring in a rare moment of candor, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Kesler cautions: “Those words mean this will be a different country when he’s finished with it”—“a new land.”

CASUAL

I recall an interview with William Faulkner in which he said that he didn’t read books but read in books, the distinction being that he seldom consumed a volume from start to finish but preferred to stick his toes in here and there, read favorite chapters over and over, proceeding from finish to start if necessary.

I don’t precisely follow Faulkner in this—although I do like to scandalize my alluring wife by reading the ends of novels before the beginnings—but it occurs to me that, over a lifetime, I have tended to dabble in movies rather than watch them from opening credits to finishing scroll. Why is this? I’m not sure. ...

SCRAPBOOK

The Scrapbook resolutely refuses to take the Kennedy Center Honors seriously, and this year’s carefully balanced, politically vetted selection of lifetime achievers in the performing arts​—​Dustin Hoffman, Led Zeppelin, Buddy Guy, Natalia Makarova, David Letterman​—​prompts us to change our mind not one whit. Discerning readers will note that there is the requisite Hollywood figure (Hoffman), African American (Guy), TV personality (Letterman), and representative of High Art (Makarova). We’re not quite sure where Led Zeppelin fits in here, but since last year’s list featured Neil Diamond, and Sir Paul McCartney made the cut the year before, we have an idea where this is going.